This Week in Digital: w/c February 13th

 
What’s happened this week:

• Lots of mobile interaction during Super Bowl TV ads, including a dozen which urged users to scan the ad with the Shazam app
• Twitter is very close to announcing 500m users
• Facebook Timeline has led to an increase in many other  third party sites and apps. MySpace (remember them?) is doing particularly well this year

 What we have learned:

• Forrester predicts 1billion Smartphone and tablet users by 2016 – 90% of these will be Apple, Android or Windows, with this chart of US users showing the huge potential in mobile as most devices are not smartphones
• Pinterest is growing in popularity incredibly quickly, with more referral traffic to sites in January than Google+, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and MySpace all combined
• The new iPad app Wisdom can analyze huge groups of people based on their Facebook behaviours, e.g. Democrats vs. Republicans or Football fans:
• The app economy has created almost 500k jobs since 2007

 Cool stuff

• The latest Spiderman trailer had a hidden link to a great new Alternate Reality Game (ARG) in 6 US cities
• Scientists have discovered an amazing way of using your heartbeat to replace passwords
• A Google Search engineer has left a Radio 1 inspired Easter egg. When users type in “Jason Isaacs”, a special Mark Kermode inspired message appears, as the presenter has said “Hello” to Jason Isaacs in almost every episode of the movie review show for ten years

 Where to find more:

• Are QR codes replacing SMS? We don’t think so just yet… the question is when will augmented reality replace QR?
• Some very useful mobile commerce and consumer behaviour insights
• Interesting view on how Twitter is causing increased demand for breaking news but with varied accuracy.

- Sam (thanks to JP, Mark and the Futures team)